January 5, 2009
Is Rapid Fat Loss Right For You?
As we enter the new year, coming out of nearly three straight months of too much food and too little training, it’s nearly guaranteed that people will be stepping up their weight loss efforts. Now, there are and always have been a million and one (only a slight exaggeration) diet books out there, including mine. Fast diets, long-term diets, you name it and someone has written a book about it.
In this context, a question worth examining is whether or not it’s better to go into a gradual, slow approach to weight loss, making small changes to habits or to just jump in feet first and go for rapid weight loss. Psychologically, many people are inherently drawn to faster programs because they get the weight off sooner. It’s just human nature, people always want more faster now. But is faster better or worse than a slower approach to weight loss?
It’s taken almost as a matter of faith in the fitness world that slower rates of weight loss are superior to faster rates, that diets generating faster weight loss always cause faster rates of regain and poorer long-term results. As I’ll mention below, there is certainly some data to support that.
It’s also often suggested that dieters set more moderate weight loss goals (e.g. lose ten pounds vs. 40 pounds) compared to larger ones; this is based on the idea that smaller goals are more realistic and more likely to succeed.
But just because something is a long-standing dogma doesn’t make it true. And if it were as simple as slower is always better, I wouldn’t be bothering to write this article.
Fast vs. Slow Initial Weight Loss
It might come as a shock to many readers, who have only ever seen the standard dogma, that a fair amount of data actually shows that a faster/greater initial weight loss is often associated with better long-term maintenance. Yup, that’s right, better weight maintenance. Not worse.
